992 Kilcullen’s Afghanistan Brief
David Kilcullen gives the New Yorker‘s George Packer what must be one of the best, most concise briefs on Afghanistan available from a Western perspective:
Well, we need to be more effective in what we are doing, but we also need to do some different things, as well, with the focus on security and governance. The classical counterinsurgency theorist Bernard Fall wrote, in 1965, that a government which is losing to an insurgency isnt being out-fought, its being out-governed. In our case, we are being both out-fought and out-governed for four basic reasons:
(1) We have failed to secure the Afghan people. That is, we have failed to deliver them a well-founded feeling of security. Our failing lies as much in providing human securityeconomic and social wellbeing, law and order, trust in institutions and hope for the futureas in protection from the Taliban, narco-traffickers, and terrorists. In particular, we have spent too much effort chasing and attacking an elusive enemy who has nothing he needs to defendand so can always run away to fight another dayand too little effort in securing the people where they sleep. (And doing this would not take nearly as many extra troops as some people think, but rather a different focus of operations).
(2) We have failed to deal with the Pakistani sanctuary that forms the political base and operational support system for the Taliban, and which creates a protective cocoon (abetted by the fecklessness or complicity of some elements in Pakistan) around senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
(3) The Afghan government has not delivered legitimate, good governance to Afghans at the local levelwith the emphasis on good governance. In some areas, we have left a vacuum that the Taliban has filled, in other areas some of the Afghan governments own representatives have been seen as inefficient, corrupt, or exploitative.
(4) Neither we nor the Afghans are organized, staffed, or resourced to do these three things (secure the people, deal with the safe haven, and govern legitimately and well at the local level)partly because of poor coalition management, partly because of the strategic distraction and resource scarcity caused by Iraq, and partly because, to date, we have given only episodic attention to the war.
So, bottom linewe need to do better, but we also need a rethink in some key areas starting with security and governance. [More…]
Via Abu Muqawama and SWJ.
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